Microservices and containers have been gaining traction in the new age of application development coupled with, for example, container integration (CI)/continuous deployment (CD) model. One prevalent example standard of this system is provided by Docker. Containers have introduced new challenges to data centers in areas of provisioning, monitoring, manageability and scale. Monitoring and analytics tools are key asks from IT and data center operators to help the operators understand the network usage especially with the set of hybrid workloads present within a data center.
Typically, orchestration tools (e.g., Kubernetes, Swarm, Mesos etc.) are used for deploying containers. On the other hand, discovering and visualizing the container workloads on the servers is achieved by (1) listening to container events (start, stop etc.) from the container orchestrators along with associated metadata as to what container is running what application, the IP, the MAC, the image etc. and (2) gleaning physical connectivity via link discovery protocols (e.g., link layer discovery protocol (LLDP)/Cisco discovery protocol (CDP)) from the server and leaf (top of the rack (ToR)) switches. A Data Center controller like Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) already has the Data Center (DC) fabric topology information and therefore, visualizing the container workloads is a matter of correlating the connectivity information with the physical topology.
However, the above discovery and visualization process is inadequate in case of deployment of blade switches within a DC that sits between a blade server and leaf switches or ToRs. This is due to the fact that a blade switch consumes the LLDP/CDP frames and thus the connectivity information of a blade server (and consequently containers running on such blade server) to a network leaf will become invisible and cannot be gleaned easily. Therefore, it is not possible to determine information about container deployments across blade servers within a data center environment that connect to leaf switches within a fabric of a data center via one or more blade switches.